Appeals Ruling Faults Dcf

Says Agency Failed To Give Girl Care Ordered By Court

June 09, 2006|By COLIN POITRAS; Courant Staff Writer

The state Department of Children and Families' repeated failure to provide court-ordered psychiatric care for a troubled girl who had been removed from her family has brought a rebuke from one of the state's highest courts.

DCF officials Thursday protested the Appellate Court's decision to uphold a lower court contempt citation, saying they tried their best to provide services for the child referred to in court documents as Leah S. They are considering an appeal.

But agency watchdogs said the ruling exposes the shortfalls that continue to plague the state child welfare system and place hundreds of children at risk.

``This decision is one more indication that the most consistently negligent `parent' in Connecticut is the Department of Children and Families,'' said Richard Wexler, executive director of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

``Leah was a troubled child when the Department of Children and Families took responsibility for her care,'' Wexler said. ``After bouncing her from foster home to foster home and offering no help to her or her family, Leah almost certainly is a lot more troubled now.''

In a nine-page decision released late Wednesday, the Appellate Court found that Superior Court Judge Thayer Baldwin Jr. in Middletown was justified in citing DCF for contempt in September 2004 for failure to comply with three separate court orders to take care of Leah's ``unmistakable and urgent'' psychiatric needs. Baldwin also ordered DCF to pay Leah's mother, who sought the contempt citation, $500 in attorney fees.

Leah was taken from her parents on April 9, 2003, after DCF social workers convinced a judge that her parents were unable to care for her. A subsequent mental health evaluation showed Leah had chronic depression, bipolar disorder, attention adjustment disorder and other behavioral problems.

Leah's violent and aggressive behavior, coupled with suicidal and homicidal thoughts and daily migraine headaches, caused problems for the foster families, case records show. During her various stays in foster homes, Leah reportedly tried to hurt a family cat and was arrested for assaulting a 2-year-old foster sister. At one point, one of Leah's foster mothers was forced to sleep in a hallway because she feared Leah would hurt her children, the ruling said.

Although DCF's own workers recommended that Leah be placed as soon as possible in a therapeutic group home or residential treatment center where she could receive intensive counseling and care, the agency instead bounced Leah around four different non-therapeutic foster homes for seven months where she suffered the possible effects of overmedication and where her psychiatric condition deteriorated, the ruling said.

Appellate Judge Thomas A. Bishop, who wrote the decision, called the case facts ``troubling.''

``While Leah was in foster care, the department failed to provide her with mental health treatment, failed to provide her foster parents with adequate support, failed to provide her parents with counseling classes designed to educate them on how to raise children with mental health issues and made no effort to facilitate counseling between Leah and her brother,'' Bishop wrote.

The Appellate Court dismissed DCF's contention that the court's expectations of the agency were vague and unclear and, as a result, the agency could not be held in contempt.

Bishop said DCF was intimately familiar with Leah's needs and failed to provide the same kind of mental health care it had accused Leah's mother of failing to provide when the agency took Leah.

The ruling ``highlights the importance of appropriate mental health treatment for children with specialized needs,'' said Susan B. Carr, the Waterford attorney who represented Leah's mother. Carr said Leah's removal from her family hurt both.

DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt said the agency has changed greatly since 2003 when Leah first entered foster care.

Kleeblatt referred to a federal court monitor's assessment of the agency released Thursday that showed DCF has made significant gains in conducting mandatory mental health assessments of abused and neglected children, meeting case load standards and in reducing repeated incidents of neglect and abuse in families already known to the system.

The monitor's report showed DCF has met 15 out of 22 court-set performance goals, the agency's best showing since the monitor began evaluating the goals two years ago. The DCF needs to meet all 22 goals to be removed from federal court oversight. A federal judge started supervising DCF's performance 15 years ago after Connecticut child advocates sued the department for failing to adequately help thousands of children in its care.

``The work in this case dates back three years. We believe there is solid proof that our practice has improved since then and there are many more resources available in terms of service,'' Kleeblatt said.